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“Sold on Reasonable Terms”

Early American Newspaper Advertisements

by Jack Lynch

Journalists are worried. Hardly
a month goes by without another
newspaper going broke.
There’s a website, NewspaperDeathWatch.com, which chronicles
the demise of once-thriving dailies
and weeklies. The problem is the
breakdown of the business model on
which papers depended. The subscription fees of most newspapers never
paid all the bills; papers need advertisers
to cover their expenses. And as the advertisers
abandon the papers for other media,
the papers fight for survival.

Advertising has been part of the newspaper
business since it began in England
at the end of the seventeenth century,
and was essential to the earliest papers
in North America. Massachusetts residents
who in 1704 read the first issue of
the Boston News-Letter—the first newspaper
in the colonies—would have seen
this paragraph:

This News Letter is to be continued
Weekly; and all Persons who
have any Houses, Lands, Tenements,
Farmes, Ships Vessels, Goods,
Wares or Merchandizes, &c. to be
Sold or Lett . . . or Goods Stole or
Lost, may have the same Inserted at a Reasonable Rate; from Twelve Pence to
Five Shillings and not to exceed.

A week later, a subscriber responded by placing
an ad seeking to recover lost property: “Lost on the
10. of April last off Mr. Shippen’s Wharff in Boston,
Two Iron Anvils.” The advertiser apparently had
no luck with this, the first classified ad in America,
because the same notice appeared a week later. This
time, though, it was accompanied by a real estate
opportunity too good to pass up: “At Oysterbay on
Long-Island, in the Providence of N. York, There is
a very good Fulling-Mill, to be let or Sold, as also a
Plantation, having on it a large new Brick house.”
The newspaper business and the advertising business
got under way together.

As the years passed, ads became ever more common.
A reader who picked up the Virginia Journal
and Alexandria Advertiser for February 12, 1784, for
instance, would find advertisements on three of its
four pages. William Hartshorne and Company took
up more than half of the front page with offers for
“Printed cottons and calicoes, Ladies’ hair-pins, Artificial
flowers, Corks and cheese, Candles by the box,
Neat pocket volumes of poetry, Bibles, testaments,
prayer-books, and spelling-books, Sail-cloth from
number 1 to 8, Coopers axes and adzes, Copper teakettles
and coffee-pots, Sweet oil in bottles, Black
pepper,” and “Loaf sugar.” The firm also advised delinquent
customers: “Those indebted to said HARTSHORNE
and COMPANY; would do them a singular
kindness in making payment at this time, as they
are desirous of extending their trade.”

On the next page James Adam touted “fine
Ship-Bread of a good quality,” and Alexandria’s
Printing Office offered “ALMANACKS, For the Year
of our LORD, One Thousand Seven Hundred and
Eighty-Four.” On page 3, Robert Allison drew attention
to his “BROADCLOTHS, shalloons, durants,
calamancoes, coat and vest buttons, sleeve ditto,
twist, sewing silk, knives and forks,” which he was
willing to part with “for CASH, TOBACCO, HEMP
or FLOUR.” And on page four, right after a poem
and a morally improving essay, appeared advertisements
from four other firms, all offering groceries
and dry goods.

Sometimes these advertisements seem quaintly
antiquated. Cooper’s axes, shalloons, and
ship-bread, after all, aren’t promoted in many modern newspapers, and you can’t trade hemp or
flour for goods today. Colonial ads were almost always
local, placed by retailers rather than manufacturers,
since there were no national brands. There
wouldn’t be an advertising agency in America until
1841, when Volney B. Palmer opened a shop in Philadelphia.

Still, despite the differences, it’s hard to shake
the sense that these 250-year-old ads are familiar.
We find in them the same mix of businesses that
marks advertisements today. Those who’ve seen infomercials
hawking patent remedies will be at home
with this announcement from the Pennsylvania
Chronicle in 1772:

Dr. George Weed . . . hath to sell a neat assortment
of medicines, among which are; The Royal
Balsam Syrup against the bloody flux; Syrup of
Balsam, against coughs and colds; Bitter Tincture,
for the head and stomach; Ointment to
cure burns and scalds; Ointment and Powder to
cure the piles, Ointment to cure inflamed Eyes.
Printed directions will be given with each of
them with their particular virtues. He can with
pleasure acquaint the public, that the success
of these medicines hath been so great, there is
a continual sale of them.

Here we can see the origins of perennial advertising
practices—extravagant promises accompanied
by a warning that purchasers must act soon, lest the
good doctor sell out before they’ve found relief.

Much about these advertisements—breathless
hyperbole, extravagant promises—is familiar to
modern eyes. But a common class of ads reminds
us at once that their world is not ours. That first
issue of the Boston News-Letter not only welcomed
advertisements for “Wares or Merchandizes, &c. to
be Sold, or Let . . . or Goods Stole or Lost,” but it
also invited notices of “Servants Run-away.” And
we have to remember that, to eighteenth-century
sensibilities, the “Wares or Merchandizes . . . to be
Sold” included human beings.

Early American newspapers bristled with ads
about slaves. Promotions of sales, whether of individual
slaves or “parcels,” were common. The Boston
News-Letter for March 12, 1710, for instance, ran a
series of advertisements—“All sorts of Cables and
Anchors for Sloops, Good green Tea, Pomcitron, wet
sweetmeets, Luke Olives”—followed by this notice:

A Likely Negro Man
about 18 years of Age
Speaks good English
and served some
time to a House Carpenter,
To be sold:
Inquire at the Post-
Office in Boston and
know further.

Alongside announcements
of sales were offers of rewards
for capturing enslaved
persons who had
escaped their owners. This
one from Williamsburg’s
Virginia Gazette, November
5, 1736, is typical:

RAN away Two Negro
Men Slaves; One of them called Poplar, from
my House in King William County, some Time
in June last; He is a lusty well-set likely Fellow,
of a middle Stature, upwards of 30 Years old,
and talks pretty good English: The other called
Planter, from my plantation in Roy’s Neck, in
the County of King and Queen, about the Month
of August following. He is a young Angola Negro,
very black, and his Lips are remarkably red. . . .
N.B. The Negroe Poplar is Outlaw’d.

What may be most revealing is usually left
unspoken in the ads themselves. The language of
marketing brings home, in a way statistics cannot,
just how much slaves were viewed as commodities.
Not only were enslaved people advertised alongside
hairpins, teakettles, and candles; sometimes they
appeared in the same ad. This paragraph from the
Charleston Morning Post for August 23, 1786, for
example, ends with a jarring postscript:

Gambia negroes.
JUST arrived in the sloop Good
Intent, Capt. Garner, from
Africa, a few of the finest young
SLAVES,
ever imported into South-Carolina, to be sold, for
cash or produce, on board the sloop at Prioleau’s
wharf.
J. & E. Penman,
No. 75, Bay,Who have also for Sale,
A few bags of COFFEE,
and Cases of LIQUEURS.

The Georgia Gazette
of October 20, 1763, announced
goods on sale
after the arrival of a
ship from Jamaica:

About nineteen
valuable new NEGROES,
muscovado
sugar by the tierce
or quarter cask, Jamaica
rum . . . bottled
ale and cyder,
coffee, &c. to be sold
on reasonable terms.

And the Maryland Journal of July 4, 1786, offered

NEGROES, HORSES, CATTLE, HOUSEHOLD
FURNITURE, and other articles too tedious to
mention.—Three months credit, from the time
of sale, will be given the purchasers, on giving
good security.

Coffee, rum, cider, horses, furniture, and slaves,
a list the dealers found “too tedious to mention,” all
available on reasonable terms.

Hardly an issue of a newspaper appeared
without an ad about a runaway. The weekly
South-Carolina Gazette included seven notices
of escaped slaves in May 1783, and there were
ninety-eight in the Virginia Journal, another weekly,
in 1785.

Early Americans got their news in a package
that bundled current events with promotions of the
slave trade. Sometimes the juxtapositions between
news items and ads could be striking. July 11, 1776,
subscribers to the New-York Journal read for the
first time the text of the Declaration of Independence,
with its provision that “all men are created
equal.” But when they turned the sheet over, they
saw a page of such advertisements as: “TEN DOLLARS
Reward. RUN AWAY from the subscriber
on Thursday the 20th instant, a negro man named JACK . . . FIVE DOLLARS
REWARD. RUN AWAY
from the subscriber on
the 16th instant, a negro
man, named PRINCE . .
. ONE DOLLAR Reward.
RUN AWAY from the subscriber
. . . a negro man
named SAMSON, about
50 years of age.” A few
days later, Boston’s Continental
Journal devoted
page one to the text of the
Declaration, but page four
included these notices:

A Negro Woman.
TO be SOLD, a likely
young Negro Woman
that understands
House-work, common Cooking, &c., has had
the Small-Pox.

EIGHT DOLLARS REWARD.
RAN away from the Subscriber . . . about 5
Weeks ago; a Negro Man named Cato, about
twenty-five Years of Age . . .

N.B. The above Negro was seen one day last
Week at Lanesborough, and is a sly Rogue, and
whoever takes him, is desired to be careful of
him.

The names that appeared beneath the advertisements
can also catch our attention. This ad, from the
Maryland Gazette of August 20, 1761, for instance—

RAN away from a Plantation of the Subscriber’s,
on Dogue-Run in Fairfax, . . . the following
Negroes, viz.

Peres, 35 or 40 Years of Age, a well-set Fellow,
of about 5 Feet 8 Inches high . . .

Jack, 30 Years (or thereabouts) old, a slim,
black, well made Fellow, of near 6 Feet high, a
small Face, with Cuts down each Cheek . . .

Cupid, 23 or 25
Years old, a black
well made Fellow, 5
Feet 8 or 9 Inches
high, round and full
faced, with broad
Teeth before, the
Skin of his Face is
coarse, and inclined
to be pimpley . . .

—seems unremarkable
until the last paragraph,
which reads,

Whoever apprehends
the said Negroes,
so that the
Subscriber may
readily get them,
shall have, if taken up in this County, Forty
Shillings Reward, beside what the Law allows;
and if at any greater Distance, or out of
the Colony, a proportionable Recompence paid
them, by

George Washington.

The Virginia Gazette for September 14, 1769,
included this:

RUN away from the subscriber in Albemarle,
a Mulatto slave called Sandy, about 35 years
of age, his stature is rather low, inclining to
corpulence, and his complexion light . . . He
is greatly addicted to drink, and when drunk
is insolent and disorderly, in his conversation
he swears much, and in his behaviour is artful
and knavish . . . Whoever conveys the said slave
to me, in Albemarle, shall have 40s. reward, if
taken up within the county, 4 l., if elsewhere in
the colony, and 10 l. if in any other colony, from

Thomas Jefferson

These ads remind us that the slave trade was
a business that depended on marketing, and
that many early Americans viewed slaves as
another commodity. But they can be illuminating.
They often give details about what the slaves were
wearing when they escaped, what trades they had
learned, their proficiency in English—details rarely
preserved in other records. Even the omissions can reveal things about the state of enslaved people in
the colonies and early republic. The ages the ads
give are almost always approximate—“about 18
years of Age,” “upwards of 30 Years old”—suggesting
that the slave owners could only guess, presumably
because no birth records had been kept.

A little idle browsing through some early American
advertisements can enlighten the social historian,
professional or amateur, because they help
put together a portrait of an age with clues not preserved
elsewhere in the historical record.

Virginia Gazette

Virginia Gazette

The aptly named Pole flogged fishing gear for “Any Gentlemen
going on Parties of Pleasure, in the Fowling or Fishing way.”

Businesses hoping to entice customers used pictures as well as words to sell pants or hats or even fire engines, with more
expansive descriptions than modern advertising and Twitter-starved language permit.

Businesses hoping to entice customers used pictures as well as words to sell pants or hats or even fire engines, with more
expansive descriptions than modern advertising and Twitter-starved language permit.

Tom Costa, “What Can We Learn from a Digital Database
of Runaway Slave Advertisements?” International Social
Science Review 76, nos. 1–2 (2001): 36–43.
———, “The Geography of Slavery in Virginia,” www2.
vcdh.virginia.edu/gos/, a database of more than 4,000
advertisements for runaway slaves from 1736 through
1803.

Jonathan Prude, “To Look upon the ‘Lower Sort’: Runaway
Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in
America, 1750–1800,” Journal of American History 78,
no. 1 (June 1991): 124–59.